Childhood Obesity

Parents, teachers and public health officials are growing increasingly alarmed at the rising incidences of childhood obesity, juvenile diabetes and related health problems. In all, about one in three children in America are overweight or obese. While the causes of such conditions are varied, it's clear that one factor is that young people are spending less time outdoors, whether it's because recess periods are being cut back or because kids spend more time inside after school and on the weekends.

March 21, 2010 - ConsumerAffairs.com article "A Kaiser Permanente study of 710,949 children and teens appears in the Journal of Pediatrics. It found that extreme obesity is affecting more children at younger ages..." "It's the first study to provide a snapshot of the prevalence of extreme obesity in a contemporary cohort of children ages 2 - 19 years from a large racially and ethnically diverse population using the recent 2009 U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention extreme obesity definition.

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The No Child Left Inside Act would help address this problem by increasing the time students spend learning about nature, both in and outside the classroom. Such lessons are often more engaging to students and often lead them to become more active outside.